Book Review by: Aakriti Kuntal
Diacritics of Desire
Genre: Poetry
Author: Nikita Parik
Pages: 78
ISBN-13: 978-938788356
Price: ₹ 299; $8.99
Nikita Parik's debut book does what most don't; use language to
untangle language. Nikita slowly undresses her linguistic minds, parting the
threads and revealing to us in a myriad of flavors, images, sounds, and
symbols, a juxtaposition of longing and desires. The amalgamation of linguistic
strains with a dexterous and elegant command gives us what we may call a
repertoire of stunning poems.
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| Aakriti Kuntal |
Diacritics of Desire comes in two parts, Semantics of Longing and
Deixis of the Soil. It is no surprise then that we are flattered with rather
innovative titles. Nikita invents a new class of language with her almost
arithmetic cellular pods– plastic, cellophane, uniquely solid and compact with
a transparent gauze. The title of the first poem 'Phonetic Maze' is rather apt
for what follows, burrows and lanes of longing woven into syllables and
dialects, lisp and vowels, a stretched stutter and poised control.
'Semantics of Longing' embroiders on our skin, dreamy narratives of
love. She does what poets do, love feverishly to the point of worship. Consider
the lines…
‘If we/are indeed the universe experiencing/ itself, it is safe to say
your molten/ black gaze contains universes of universes that explode star stuff/
whenever they meet the fulminating/ thunders in mine,’
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| Poet: Nikita Parik |
When not praising her lover in adoration she is breathing in her minty
experiences. A stark sense of nostalgia, defining beauty and a hint of melancholy
in them. She writes…
‘On no-heartbeat-days as these, /we’d just lie here, next to/our
aborted nothingness, /watching their crimson corpses decay, /and
bleedbleedbleed it out/in the name of creativity.’
Some poems like Diacritics of Desire and First Names Matter revel in an
alternate realm of linguistics, symbols and syllables, le virguell and le
cedille', swaying us into a parallel dimension of thought. Nikita masterfully
carries us into her mind palace without letting us lose sense of the meaning
that penetrates her poems.
‘Like Gulzar and so many/others, I want to write/a poem on that
precise/moment when one falls in/love with their first names for/the first time
as I/imagine the syllables/forming in your mouth-/the nasal n rushing into/the
voiceless velar stop,/both holding on to the long ─У/that shapes your lips into
the ghost of a smile,’
In Deixis of the Soil, Nikita wanders in eternal lands, brown, pink,
sun-soaked and vareigated. She is a kindred spirit exploring her various
alignments, her constituents, her identities, her selves rooted to places by
origin and by habits, her bodies wandering in a quest that seeks no answers,
only solace.
‘It is okay to spoon a mother tongue after/twenty-one years of
existence-/to be awkward in a language that ougth to be/ yours, but feel
familiarly distant -the retroflex sounds/getting stuck in your throat. / It is
okay as long as the nasal ‘M’ in their/ ‘Padharo ‘M’hare Des’ quietly morphs
into/an alveolar ‘T’, and their personal pronouns/warmly becomes yours.’
We find ourselves immersed in sensual experiences, aromas diffused
above paper, words we can smell, taste, touch– homemade delicacies, grandma's verandah,
sangria and phali. Words that enter our body and startle all our palates.
Perhaps, one of the finest portrayals of nostalgia one can come across.
However, Nikita does not end there. She adds a piquant streak to the
entire book with her poems like Living Room and Kitchen. Here, she evokes the
most delicate senses, giving us a glimpse into the sensuality of everyday
things, a mole, a garden, an evening of cooking and a sweat-soaked dance.
Nikita's writing is fine, dictated, carefully sharpened into blossoms
meanwhile rooted in an array of Indian joys and condiments. Her poems are
attics and multi-storey buildings built upon the foundation of love, longing,
identity, and desire, growing perpetually into a stack. A stack of poems built
with arches and tangents from the world of linguistics. It is evident that she
perceives the world in these symbols and while reading the book we all will
borrow this beautiful sense from her.
Reviewer's Bio: Aakriti Kuntal, aged 26, is a poet and writer from Gurugram, India. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Selcouth Station, The Hindu, Madras Courier, Pangolin Review, Blue Nib, and Visual Verse among others. She was awarded the Reuel International Prize 2017 for poetry and was a finalist for the RL Poetry Award 2018.
Poet's Bio: Nikita Parik, 26, currently works as the Assistant Editor of Ethos Literary Journal. She holds an MA in Linguistics, an MA in English, and an Advanced Diploma of three years in French studies. Her works have appeared/are forthcoming in The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Metaworker, The Commonline Journal, Shot Glass Journal, Open Road Review Literary Journal, Ann Arbor Review: An International Journal of Poetry, and so on. Her debut book of poetry, Diacritics of Desire, was published by Hawakal publishers in April 2019.
